And the Birds Rained Down

by Jocelyne Saucier

  ‘There, it’s over. It’s passed.’

  They are in the darkest corner of the cabin, but on this beautiful summer’s day, even dark corners have some light, and Charlie follows the light that travels to every recess of Marie-Desneige’s body.

  They are naked.

  The first few times, they swam in their underwear, but the discomfort of wet underwear once they were dressed convinced them to swim naked. Each reacted differently to the other’s nakedness. Marie-Desneige stifled a giggle. Charlie’s body, large up top, stood on little bow legs between which hung his genitals, which seemed to her enormous, disproportionate. As for Charlie, he could not take his eyes off the white bouquet of pubic hair. But they got used to seeing each other naked. Swimming was even more enjoyable with no clothes coming between the silky water and their skin.

  ‘Shhhhh, no, please don’t.’

  She is so small in his arms, and he rocks her like a child.

  ‘Shhhhhh, no, don’t sing, please don’t sing,’ Charlie begs.

  She is still struggling. She has not completely reassembled her body. Being rocked in Charlie’s arms calms her a little, but brings back the plaintive song that helps her resurface. He can’t handle the threnody. And to avoid hearing it, he starts to sing, one sound at a time, intoning three notes, a monotonous chant that comes to him from another life, when his wife was lulling the children to sleep.

  ‘Lala-lala, lala-lala…’

  The lullaby works. Marie-Desneige relaxes.

  ‘There,’ she says.

  Charlie lays her on the furs and places his hand where she shows him to. The skin under his leathery palm is warm and soft.

  ‘There,’ she says again.

  And the hand caresses her stomach under her sagging breast.

  She smiles. She comes back to life. Charlie feels the knots of panic releasing under his hand.

  ‘There?’ he asks, indicating the white bouquet.

  She smiles, naughty and flirtatious; she is thirty years younger. He has grown younger too. At that moment, they are fifty years old. Maybe twenty.

  THE COLLECTION OF IMPOSSIBLE LOVES

  ‘Miss Sullivan’ was how the woman introduced herself the first time the photographer visited the small municipal museum of Matheson. No first name, only Miss, which she stressed like a noble title. The photographer remembered an old maid, withered, very tall, lanky and stooped. She could well have had flat feet and an inverted sacrum, the photographer thought, so out of balance did her bony, forbidding body seem. But so romantic it could bring tears to your eyes. To hear her tell it, the young Boychuck wandered days in the rubble looking for his beloved. That’s what brought the photographer back to the little museum in Matheson.

  She had brought Ted’s portrait of the little old bird lady.

  The lady at the museum had no trouble identifying her. Angie Polson, she said without hesitation. Angie was the one who took off with the musician. The other twin was Margie, and she died a long time ago. Angie was the more stunning of the two, the lady added. The photographer didn’t doubt it.

  She had also brought with her a few paintings from the Young Girls With Long Hair series. She held out no hope that the woman would be able to identify them. Even Marie-Desneige had a hard time deciphering the paintings. No, what she hoped was that she would tell her one more time about the flowers that had been spotted in the hands of the young wandering Boychuck. Flowers for his beloved, the woman had said. An old maid’s romantic twaddle, the photographer had thought, but now she wondered whether this love story didn’t have a kernel of truth.

  When she announced her intention to go back to the museum in Matheson, Tom’s response had been scathing. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘are you this interested in other people’s lives because you don’t have one of your own?’

  She was aware that her presence was the subject of comment and speculation at the hideaway. She was accepted and liked, they enjoyed her company, but they were worried that a woman, still young, in her early forties they figured, had no other needs. Of course, she went back to Toronto where she had matters to attend to, but as soon as those matters were settled, she came back to the hideaway. It was as if she knew no other way of living. In photos, in paintings and in life, she needed old people.

  ‘You don’t pay much attention to your life,’ Charlie remarked one day.

  ‘What about Bruno? And Steve?’

  ‘That’s different,’ and he mimed smoking a joint.

  There was no need to worry about Steve and Bruno, he said. They had a life all mapped out: marijuana and retiring in the middle of the forest. One day they would be the two old men at the hideaway, or they’d stay in the Lebanese man’s hotel until the end of their days, if the hotel was still standing.

  ‘Are you going to take care of them too when they’re old?’

  She didn’t answer. Charlie was kidding himself if he thought he would have successors. Bruno had no calling to be a hermit in the forest. And Steve – well, Steve, yes, maybe, you couldn’t really tell with Steve. He truly didn’t care what the future held. As for her, she had no particular penchant for pot, a little bit here and there, nothing more, and no calling to be a caregiver. She had slipped into the role of Ange-Aimée out of compassion, out of friendship, and then in the end she found it suited her, this skin that was not hers and that was comforting, consoling and supportive. But since they had discovered the paintings, she had found her old personality, and that was what sent her back to the museum in Matheson.

  Miss Sullivan was delighted. Visitors were rare, return visitors even rarer, and there was a magnificent love story in the bundle of paintings her guest had brought with her. Magnificent, painful, secret: the perfect ingredients.

  She hadn’t known the Polson twins when their beauty was in full bloom. ‘I’m too young,’ she said, ‘sixty-six years old.’ The photographer found her desire to reveal her age charming. She offered the hoped-for reaction.

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  She did look it, easily, but sixty-six was indeed too young to have known the Polson twins when they were the wonders of Matheson. She had known them later. Miss Sullivan was then fifteen, was called Virginia, was already tall and thin and very romantic, and had been waiting for her mother to finish chatting with the owner of the general store, where they had gone for grommets for their drapes, when they saw Angie Polson pass by the window at a brisk pace heading toward the train station.

  ‘There goes a girl who’s not afraid to be a bother,’ her mother or the clerk had said.

  Angie Polson was nothing like the other women in Matheson. That was her unforgivable sin. Elegant, poised and stylish, she was suspected of having a secret life in Toronto or somewhere else, since, at over forty, she was unmarried and childless, and still just as beautiful. An original, from the big Bohemian scarf to the vertiginously high heels. No one in Matheson dressed like that, or had that energy, that freedom. The young Virginia was filled with admiration.

  At the age of fifteen, she already looked like the old maid she would become, but that same little heart beat in the same chest, and this rebellious woman filled with ardent, tumultuous love, probably forbidden love, whom she had seen pass in front of the general store, became the emblem of the life she would never have. She knew that the great love she dreamed of simply would not be.

  Who had Angie Polson been bothering? Everyone and no one in particular – her mother’s remark or the clerk’s came from that inexhaustible supply of nasty comments that small towns keep circulating day in and day out.

  And so the tall, thin and romantic Virginia Sullivan started to collect the scattered fragments of the secret loves of Angie Polson, which made her particularly sensitive to anything that was said or sighed in Matheson. She found out more than she need to know about people’s lives. Jealousies, grudges, vengeance, horrible secrets and small redemptions, she herself was astonished with what she collected. Listening to the slightest peep that reached her ears, piecing together a
nd pulling apart everything she had been told, she became highly skilled in the art of the secret. This was how she guessed the secret loves of just about everyone in Matheson.

  The photographer didn’t understand what she meant when the long grey silhouette bent over her and asked, in a conspiratorial tone, ‘Do you want to see my collection?’

  From the wide smile that met her astonished eyes, she under­stood that she was having bestowed upon her a great honour.

  ‘There is nothing more beautiful than an impossible love.’

  The notebook that Miss Sullivan placed in her hands was as plain as plain can be. A cardboard cover, spiral bound, lined paper. On the front were two monograms joined by a heart. While the monograms were elaborate and highly stylized, the heart was of a heartrending naiveté. Red, obviously, and pierced by Cupid’s arrow, it trickled a few drops of blood like an icon of Christ. Clearly the old maid liked hearts that bled. And there were many of them, bleeding hearts, in the glass armoire from which she pulled this notebook, and then another and another. She had twenty in all.

  ‘My collection,’ she said in a slow, soft voice.

  In love, thought the photographer, it was the voice of a woman in love. Can a woman truly find satisfaction in the loves of strangers that were never even fulfilled?

  The notebooks told stories that were profoundly sad, love burning in the hearts, but rarely in the joining of bodies, and yet these tales had a certain grace, a certain redemption. The adoring gaze of the old maid. No matter whether the bodies had come together, the important thing was the step by timid, awkward step of two beings drawn toward one another that an anonymous observer followed devotedly, noting the day and time when the man had said hello to the woman, her gesture to distance herself from the arm of her husband, and the weather the next day when the woman came back alone, at the same time, to the same place, searching for the one who was watching her from a place he could not leave. They could carry on this way for years in a delicious two-step, neither ever crossing the forbidden line. The observer’s attention never wavered. She noted everything. The changes in hairstyle, the appearance of cleavage, a starched collar, closer contact, light touches and soft looks, but once the possibility of crossing over the forbidden line appeared, it was pure elation, the observer could no longer contain herself. Would he or wouldn’t he answer the letter? If he wrote her a letter in turn, would there be a moonlit rendezvous, passionate kisses, an exchange of promises, more rendezvous, more kisses, and the husband, wild with rage, pique and pain, what would he do? She wrote about it for pages and pages, and the photographer read this, clearly seeing that the old maid’s concern was that if this love came to be, it would belong to her no more.

  At the end of notebook; GR bleeding heart YT, because rather than face a jealous husband, GR contented herself with a single passionate rendezvous.

  One notebook particularly intrigued the photographer. The bleeding heart was there, preceded by the monogram JM, but in place of the second monogram, there was a question mark.

  ‘I never found out who she loved,’ Miss Sullivan explained. ‘She was in love, of that I am sure. There was an absence in her that cannot be mistaken, an air of never actually being where she was. I searched around her, looking for the man who inhabited her. For years I followed her, to the train station, the post office, everywhere. I was hoping for a letter, a mysterious traveller, but nothing. She died with her secret and an air of waiting for someone who did not come, not even to her funeral. I was there, and the only man I saw weeping was her father. She died at thirty from having cried too much. Pleurisy, they said. It’s an apt word. The word pleurisy contains the word pleur, French for cry, and not even the slightest hint of suicide. It’s the saddest story in my collection.’

  On the cover of the last notebook were three monograms, AP, MP and TB, around a heart pierced with two arrows.

  ‘He loved them both.’

  So this was the story of the Polson twins and Boychuck compiled in a compact script by Miss Sullivan from the moment when, as young Virginia, she had spotted Angie Polson through the general store window. The final entry in the notebook was dated just a year earlier, when the photographer came to her museum looking for information about the survivors of the Great Fires and more particularly about Boychuck. Did this woman have a message for Theodore?, the old maid asked in the notebook. Had Angie entrusted this woman with a message?

  The photographer flipped through the notebook, gleaning a few sentences here and there, enough to understand that the story was hopeless. All three of them orbited around this love that kept them at a distance yet bound in a magnetic sphere that had complete power over them. There was much to-ing and fro-ing, many depressing setbacks, nobody was ever in the right place at the right time. The young Virginia followed them until she became an old maid. And always the same question returned in her sharp, tightly packed script: would Theodore end up choosing?

  ‘Theodore?’

  The photographer was intrigued. Where did this new first name come from?

  Theodore Boychuck was what was written on the envelopes. Theodore Boychuck, General Delivery, Matheson, Ontario. Sometimes in long, fine letters, sometimes in childlike loops. The twins did not share temperament or handwriting.

  ‘Theodore was his real first name.’

  The letters they sent him via General Delivery were the tenuous thread that held the whole story together. The young Virginia didn’t miss a single letter. Every day, under the pretext of going to get her parents’ mail, she went to the post office, and because she was an avid reader, and therefore literate, which was not the case for many people in Matheson, she was asked to read letters and sometimes to write them. The post mistress, not very educated herself, got into the habit of turning to her for official correspondence. One thing led to another, and she ended up helping sort the mail as well, which led to her discovery of this strange three-way dance foreshadowed each time by two letters sent to General Delivery.

  She recorded in her notebook the date and place of the postmark of both letters, normally a few days apart, since one came from Toronto and the other from Cochrane, and the date of the arrival at the train station of a man that she easily recognized. The man, tall and sombre, headed to a rooming house, left his luggage there, and then went to the post office to pick up the two letters that were waiting for him. Everything was noted in detail: his clothes, his pace, the amount of time spent at the rooming house, the way he had of nodding his head to offer thanks when handed the letters, but not a word. The still-young old maid had never heard him utter a single word.

  Obviously she read the letters. How could she have followed the whole story if she had not been a witness? She spirited them away from the post mistress, steamed them open, read them, copied long excerpts in her notebook and brought them back intact, ready to be delivered to their addressee.

  Dear Fedor, they began, or Dear Fedia. An affectionate diminutive of Theodore, the old maid explained. Angie was more comfortable using Dear Fedia, while Margie generally stuck to Dear Fedor, although the salutation could change from one to the other.

  ‘They both loved him.’

  The letters that arrived in Matheson did not arrange rendezvous but made references to rendezvous elsewhere, to other letters he or she had written or had or had not received, to changes of address, particularly in the case of Theodore, who, it seemed, had no fixed address, moving from place to place as work became available, which required the two women to follow a veritable maze of general deliveries along the railways that served Ontario, which they sometimes complained about in their letters. When will you settle down somewhere?

  The letters attested to heartbreaking advances and setbacks. Sometimes it was Angie who wrote that dear Fedia should understand that her sister Margie would not survive without his love; sometimes it was Margie who stepped aside and asked her dear Fedor to forget her, because she was now married to a man who cherished her, and to go to her sister who was free and had waite
d for him for so many years. Since Theodore could not choose, the sisters decided to do it in his stead. This incredible sacrifice that each was prepared to make was all for naught, since Theodore, unable to make a decision, simply obeyed and went from one to the other without any of them finding happiness.

  The letters referred to a whole history of missed rendezvous, failures and misunderstandings, the most difficult period being the six years during which they had no news from their dear Theodore. He had left Matheson, intending never to return, because he believed them drowned in the Black River. They in turn thought he was in Toronto. This period was decisive. The first missteps forever sealed how they would live this three-way love. The letters often referred to it: how could we have gotten lost along so many parallel roads?

  At age eighteen, Angie ran away to Toronto with a musician who was passing through, in the hopes of finding Theodore there. But Theodore was over a thousand kilometres to the west, a longshoreman in Port Arthur. Two years later, he decided to face his ghosts and got off the train at Matheson. But Margie was in Cochrane, married to a hardware store owner, and Angie was waiting for him in Toronto.

  ‘Angie was single. He could have married her, couldn’t he?’ the photographer said, exasperated.

  ‘Yes, he could have, but he loved Margie too.’

  ‘So why did Margie marry the man in Cochrane?’

  ‘To step aside for Angie.’

  ‘Good lord!’

  The story was beginning to twist and turn a bit too much for the photographer’s taste, but clearly all of these amorous complications thrilled Miss Sullivan. Her cheeks had coloured slightly, and her eyes were shining like marbles in the sun.

  But the story had the merit of answering the question about the Great Matheson Fire. What had kept young Boychuck wandering for six days? Love, there is only love, the photographer thought, to explain what we don’t understand. She was still struggling with Boychuck’s new first name, but she imagined a young Theodore in love in the smoking rubble, going back and forth along the shore of the Black River searching for two young girls. The paintings in the series Young Girls With Long Hair took on meaning, particularly the one in which Marie-Desneige was able to identify a raft capsizing in the churning black water. Young Theodore had witnessed the scene. He couldn’t rescue them, and he had wandered for days hoping to find them.